The sort of difficulties that magistrates had to contend with, owing to the slackness of the constabulary, are graphically described in a letter dated 1596 in the course of which, Mr Hext, then a Justice of the Peace for Somersetshire, complains officially to the Lord Treasurer that thieves and robbers had grown so cunning, through having often been in gaol, that these old hands could seldom be laid hold of. "Others," he writes, "are delivered to simple constables and tything-men, that sometimes wilfully, and other times negligently suffer them to escape." After suggesting that steps should be taken to punish all keepers of ale-houses who harbour suspicious persons, and all constables and tything-men who suffer them to be at large, he goes on to explain how difficult it is to get the country people to prosecute in cases of theft, "for most commonly the most simple country man and woman, looking no further than to the loss of their own goods, are of opinion, that they would not procure any man's death for all the goods in the world." This same reluctance to prosecute, as we shall see, hindered the administration of justice for many generations, and the question of how best to remove it, is to this day a police problem, that has only been partially solved by the comparatively recent institution of the office of Public Prosecutor. Mr Hext was either very credulous, or thieves' appetites must have been prodigious in the sixteenth century, for in the same letter he describes how "within this three months I took a thief, that was executed this last assizes, that confessed unto me, that he and two more lay in an ale-house three weeks: in which time they eat twenty fat sheep: whereof they stole every night one." Finally he gives a woeful account of the Egyptians (_i.e._ Gypsies) that infested his county. "The inhabitants," declares the magistrate, "being wonderfully grieved by their rapines, made complaint at our Easter Sessions, after my Lord Chief Justice's departure: precepts were made to the tythings adjoining for the apprehending of them. They made answer, but (the Gypsies) were so strong that they durst not adventure of them: whereupon precepts were made to the constables of the shire: but not apprehended, for they have intelligence of all things intended against them.... And they grow the more dangerous in that they find they have bred that fear in Justices, and other inferior officers, that no man dares call them in question."[112]